Battlefield 4 is very Battlefield with all that that entails. Good and bad.

I've played a lot of DICE's Battlefield over the years. Admittedly, I wasn't there from the start. World War II shooters bore me—Hitler's firearms were totes imba, so if the games are authentic, the Germans get all the good guns, and if they're balanced, they might as well not be set in World War II—so I never played Battlefield 1942. But I sunk hundreds upon hundreds of hours into Battlefield 2, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and Battlefield 3.

What's the draw to the Battlefield series? For a first-person shooter, the gameplay is rich and varied. It's class-based (after experimentation in past titles, the franchise now seems to have settled on four: the combat medic assault class, the anti-armor engineer, the sniping recon, and the machine gun-toting support), which means that everyone can find something useful to do, even if they're not the best shot. It has a handful of game-modes, with the objective-based Rush, my favorite, particularly emphasizing its squad-based teamplay. It has an extensive system of persistent ranking and unlocks, to ensure that there are plenty of goals to aim for. It has a wide range of vehicles, on land, sea, and in the air.

But more than anything else, Battlefield has enormous scale. Rich, sprawling, varied maps. Maps that take minutes to cross on foot, capable of sustaining multiple simultaneous skirmishes or huge multi-vehicular 32-on-32 battles. And in the newer games of the series, these maps have become important participants in the battle in their own right, with destructible buildings and scenery that mean that the structure giving you cover and concealment one second could betray you the next, crushing you beneath a pile of rubble.

My love of Battlefield has, however, always been tempered. When they have worked, the Battlefield games have provided unrivaled first person shooter experiences. But they haven't always worked. Regular crashes and hangs have been recurring features of the series, and the games have often been just plain buggy.

For as long as I played Battlefield 2, for example, it had a bug known as the "red name bug." A simple thing: people on your team would appear to have a red indicator above their head, denoting that they're an enemy, rather than a blue indicator, denoting that they're friendly. Harmless enough—unless the server had friendly fire enabled, in which case I'd be blowing away teammates thinking that they were the bad guys. For a time, Battlefield 3 had a bug where each pellet of M26 shotgun would do as much damage and have as much range as the bullets of the assault rifle it was paired with. It turned what should have been a niche-use, high-damage, short-range weapon into a long-range, unstoppable death machine.

Enlarge/ Zooming around on these choppy seas, it's enough to make you seasick.

DICE

So throughout my Battlefield career, I've been perplexed. The same company, DICE, that has managed to construct this fantastic engine and rich gameplay has also shipped glaring bugs and occasionally rampant imbalance issues and then struggled to fix those issues quickly, if at all. How one company could do both was never clear to me, and the result is that while I've loved Battlefield, I've also hated it, ragequitting in disgust as the game crapped out for no good reason again.

As a result of this history, although I didn't get to play the Battlefield 4 beta (my gaming PC was in US customs at the time), I had a good idea of what to expect going into the game. With Battlefield 4, DICE has delivered, in spades.

Although the multiplayer game is the main point of the series—early Battlefield games were only multiplayer, with a single-player game only coming later in the series—I'm going to make a quick detour into the single player game first.

The unloved single-player campaign

I realize it's not at all fashionable these days, and I fear that sooner or later game companies will just abandon them entirely, but I enjoy single player first person shooters. Sometimes these games try to be thoughtful, story-driven pieces, such as the enjoyable, albeit flawed, BioShock Infinite. Other times they are nothing more than action flicks. Just as there is a warm place in my heart for Jason Statham movies (he's surely overdue for an Oscar), there is room for military shooter single player campaigns.

It's a great shame, then, that the Battlefield 4 single player game is not very good. Mechanically, it's fine enough. It has one or two nice ideas. You unlock weapons as you progress through the single player by finding them scattered around the maps. You can then pick the weapons you want to use at various weapon crates scattered throughout the game, so if there's a particular gun you like, you can use it whenever you like.

There's also a spotting mechanism, wherein you can pick out enemies with some IR goggles and then direct your cast of NPCs to attack them.

In principle, at least, I like both of these systems. I think they give a taste of the multiplayer game—with its classes, weapon unlocks, and squads—while still respecting the structure of a checkpoint-based campaign.

The missions are generally mediocre. They strive to tick the right boxes—buildings blowing up, troops jumping out of planes, helicopters crashing, that kind of thing—but they lack any real variety. There are no missions where we're alone, for example; we always have a squad (though its composition occasionally varies). There are no missions where we do anything other than go in, guns blazing. There are no escort missions, which in some ways is good, because they're almost invariably terrible, but the change of pace would have been welcome.

The missions are also unbelievably linear. The multiplayer aspect of Battlefield is anything but linear. The huge maps, vehicles, and destruction mean that there are almost always multiple ways of getting from A to B, and the best approach will vary depending on the flow of the battle. That characteristic of the game is completely missing from the single player.

Random ideas flung haphazardly together

And then there's the story. Oh boy.

So what's wrong with it? I'm going to do my best to spoil the story, but with the understanding that I'm still not entirely clear on what the story was, so if you care, I guess you'll have to stop reading (NB: you shouldn't care).

It's important to know that the story is poorly communicated and poorly written, so if things don't sound like they're making sense, it's apparently what the authors intended. The basic setup, as I understand it, is that a Chinese admiral wants to do... something. It's not entirely clear what. We know that he assassinates liberalizing, progressive politician Jin Jie, who's thought of as the country's next leader. We discover that the Russians support the admiral in his bid to do whatever it is he wants to do. So it's pretty clear that he's some kind of traditionalist hardliner who wants to rule China. It's just the other stuff he apparently does that I can't fathom.

You play as Recker, member of the gun-toting, ass-kicking Tombstone squad. You're the standard mute character with no control over the action, being continually directed to do pretty much everything, from opening doors to planting C4 on tanks to shooting down helicopters. Recker is the new Ramirez.

The opening level of the game sees Tombstone squad fleeing Baku, Azerbaijan, after securing some piece of intelligence. Along the way, you'll meet the short-lived squad leader Dunn, the idiotically disobedient and childish Irish (though the game leaves us in no doubt that his heart is in the right place), and the utterly forgettable and entirely devoid of character, or even the crudest of characterizations, Pac. Irish may be an annoying moron, but at least he's a predictable one-dimensional character. Pac doesn't even manage that much. I don't even understand why they gave him a name.

We go to Shanghai to rescue a VIP and his CIA handler, Hannah. For some reason the admiral attacks Shanghai with an EMP. Or perhaps he's attacking the Pacific Fleet directly (or at least part of it), which happens to be a couple of miles off the Chinese coast. I figure this would be utterly idiotic, because if an American aircraft carrier got attacked like this, I'm pretty sure the US would retaliate, but it happens, and it's apparently consequence-free. Then again, I suspect that if American ships were parked so close to Shanghai, the Chinese would have torpedoed them anyway.

Either way, we rescue the VIP and get him to our boat, but because of the EMP, the ships are mostly crippled, dead in the water, and without any comms. Conveniently, that's except for our ship, the Valkyrie, whose engines were running at the time of the EMP and so is still mobile.

At this point it's imperative to get the VIP to safety. The logical, obvious thing to do would be to go to a nearby friendly place, such as South Korea or Japan, and then stick him on a plane to the US. If that wasn't an option for some reason, the next best bet would surely be to steam across the Pacific to Pearl Harbor. It's 4,939 miles as the crow flies, and apart from having to take a slight detour to avoid crashing into Japan, you could take an optimal great circle route.

But no. Apparently the preferred route is to go to the Suez Canal. Never mind that this requires taking our crippled ship thousands of extra miles, and no matter that it means navigating potentially hostile waters around the Saudi peninsula. That's where we're going. There might have been some blink-and-you'll-miss-it explanation in the game, I don't know. But it struck me as basically absurd.

Along the way you stop off at Singapore to blow up an airfield. Why do the Chinese have an airfield in Singapore? Who even knows. They probably invaded, but I feel sure that this would be treated as a major international incident, and that our crippled ship wouldn't be the only thing there to take them on. Because Dunn is dead, Hannah joins your squad. This causes Irish to be basically a jerk to her, claiming that she's untrustworthy for literally no good reason. There's nothing she's done to provoke his hostility. He's just rude and dismissive. But his rudeness appears to be vindicated at the end of the mission when, surprise, Hannah turns traitor and you get knocked out and captured by Chinese troops.

You wake up in a prison in the Kunlun Mountains in China. Sharing your cell is a radiation-scarred Russian, who for some reason speaks English, and together you break out of your cell and escape the prison. In theory, we're meant to recognize the Russian as a character from Battlefield 3's story. If you remembered who he was, then all I can say is, you were paying more attention than I was. While escaping from the prison, you're joined by Hannah, who's... friendly now. She only turned traitor as a cunning ploy to uhhh...

Yeah I dunno. It doesn't make sense. Her apparent betrayal didn't protect the team. It's not as if we needed to somehow infiltrate the prison to obtain some important MacGuffin or anything like that. It's just a place for us to fight our way out of. I guess that the hope was that we'd think "Oh wow, Irish was right all along!" but since this kind of fake double cross is such a damn cliché, we don't. We just think that Irish is a jerk.

From there, you fight your way through China until you team up with some American troops (yes: American troops, holed up in China), blowing up a dam as you go and then getting back to the Valkyrie, which has just reached the Red Sea or thereabouts. Along the way you learn that the VIP is none other than Jin Jie, who hasn't been assassinated after all.

In the final mission, you rescue Jin Jie from the clutches of the admiral's troops. The game manages another absurdity here; Jin Jie insists that instead of killing enemy troops that are about to storm the room you're in, you let them see him and hear him. The troops immediately recognize him and become loyal to him; they stop attacking and become friendly. Not one of the troops attacking is loyal to the admiral. They all immediately swear fealty to Jin and start radioing their colleagues to tell them the good news.

Troops on the admiral's ship apparently don't care, however, and they're continuing to attack the Valkyrie. You go with Hannah and Irish to blow it up, but the detonators fail, so you have to choose either Hannah or Irish to sacrifice themselves and blow it up manually. Since Irish was far and away the more annoying of the two, I chose him, without a moment's hesitation.

215 Reader Comments

Initially I was excited by this release because DICE has been porting their engine to Mac this year. However as soon as I read "you have to unlock multiplayer weapons" by finishing single player levels... oy. That is, as they say in the b'ness, "full retard".

I fail to figure out how they went from such a god awful buggy beta (not too long ago) to an actual release is beyond me. I'm aware that's what betas are, but it hasn't been that long since we all found out beta was darn near unplayable.

If you're being knifed, knifing back at just the right time will counter-knife. The knifer becomes the knifee, and you will collect their dogtags. The timing window for counter-knifing is narrow, but it means that those annoying jerks who creep up behind people all the time don't get to have things all their own way.

this only works if you're facing them when they try to knife you. side/rear attacks are just like previous games where the only way you can survive is if a teammate shoots the guy while the knife animation is playing.

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However as soon as I read "you have to unlock multiplayer weapons" by finishing single player levels... oy. That's is, as they say in the b'ness, "full retard'. Pass.

there's several dozen weapons in the game. FOUR of them are unlocked via singleplayer (a pistol that you get after the first mission, then the last mission gives you either a machinegun, SMG, or assault rifle). the LMG you get is considerably better than the starting one, but unlocking the second LMG via multiplayer is pretty easy and way faster than slogging through the entire campaign.

Why, in this day and age of rampant cheating, is an overview of current hacks and hacking stats (as much as are available) a MANDATORY part of every game review? I refuse to pay for another DICE game, or any online EA game for that matter, without knowing how successful subscription hacks have been at breaking the game. After Battlefield 3, MOH and MOH Warfigther, I'm tying of paying to be someone else's sucker.

I was a big fan of Battlefield 3 over the past year. It's really disappointing to hear about some of the decisions that were made in this game, like the unlock system. I bet there will be a shortcut purchase like in bf3 for all of the guns. It's all about the $$$ apparently.

When will these companies learn to just give gamers something more fun and less work?

I do enjoy Battlefield. I played even pretty much all of them.That said, i thought that BF4 is arriving to soon. And in that thought, is BF going the CoD route in that follow ups are released much quicker than it needed to be?

I recently started playing BF3 and i think it is overall a great game. Hadn't much issues really with bugs, but what is kind of annoying are the sometimes long waittime for the maps to be loaded. Granded, my pc is 7 years old but i wonder if thats really the reason.

Anyway, i was looking forward to jump at one point to BF4 but i think i will wait a little more and i want to kind of finish BF3 first.

I was a big fan of Battlefield 3 over the past year. It's really disappointing to hear about some of the decisions that were made in this game, like the unlock system. I bet there will be a shortcut purchase like in bf3 for all of the guns. It's all about the $$$ apparently.

what exactly is wrong with the unlock system? the class-defining gadgets are unlocked via class points which you get by just playing the game, and carbines/shotguns/DMR are all-class so you can hop on a domination server and run around with a shotgun for a while to unlock all the important things for every class without having to spend hours using a gun that you hate.

I played a lot of BF3, especially with fellow Arsians and Peter. I bought a new rig for it. I was hyped beyond belief for it, and dragged a lot of friends into the "ZOMG, you MUST play this game with me".

I enjoyed it for the first few months. But DICE's complete lack of care regarding getting rid of hackers / cheaters, and especially their nonchalance towards bug fixes finally broke the game for me. Which is really disappointing, because Ars has a fantastic gaming community with quality players and fun people.

I was also a little pissed off that beyond B2K, pre-order customers really didn't get anything. Except shafted by having to pay the same price for Premium when we've technically already paid for part of the content (B2K).

I tried the BF4 demo, I spoke up in the forums, and I've more than voiced my mind over at Reddit where, in several threads for BF3, I've called out the community managers' corporate shilling as opposed to their apparent mission of community engagement. Despite getting voted up to the top or near top, no answer to my callouts or questions. Lots of other good, quality players left because of the same issues.

DICE doesn't listen, and EA enables them to do so. They won't see another dime from me as long as the only thing they care about is getting people in the door. There's more to sustaining a quality gaming experience then taking my money.

Hitler's arms were not "totes imba." I would take a trusty M1 Garand or BAR over some unreliable Nazi prototype or ancient bolt-action shite any day. The T-34 also sliced through all German armor in the first days of Barbarossa, but that made little difference because the Soviet army was poorly positioned, had recently been decapitated and was relying on hastily promoted, untrained officers and bass-ackwards doctrines.

The Wehrmacht had better weapons than the Allies ***in the hands of a select few***. But most German troops never saw an StG44. In terms of what day-to-day soldiers were issued, I'm still convinced that the M1 Garand was by far the best rifle of the war.

Pass... I've ben burnt out on shooters for several years. I keep looking at them as they release to try and see if anything's changing, worth coming back to... but all I see are new $60 map packs with better graphics, instead of new games... /sigh

I fail to figure out how they went from such a god awful buggy beta (not too long ago) to an actual release is beyond me. I'm aware that's what betas are, but it hasn't been that long since we all found out beta was darn near unplayable.

That's nothing new. Same thing happened with BF3. The beta had such ridiculous bugs like falling under the map, hiding inside rocks, etc. It was never fixed in the beta so I had a bad feeling about the release but it was surprisingly good. I got to the point that I vastly prefer it over CoD games.

I was a big fan of Battlefield 3 over the past year. It's really disappointing to hear about some of the decisions that were made in this game, like the unlock system. I bet there will be a shortcut purchase like in bf3 for all of the guns. It's all about the $$$ apparently.

When will these companies learn to just give gamers something more fun and less work?

This. The general shitty behaviour of EA-DiCE over Battlefield 3's lifecycle means I'm sitting this one out.

The missions are also unbelievably linear. The multiplayer aspect of Battlefield is anything but linear. The huge maps, vehicles, and destruction mean that there are almost always multiple ways of getting from A to B, and the best approach will vary depending on the flow of the battle. That characteristic of the game is completely missing from the single player.

Ahhh, so DICE lied again when they tried to make a big deal about how their SP would be based off of MP and have large maps with multiple ways to do something...

Why am I even surprised? They pulled this with EVERY BF that has single player - claim on (very good) thing, and then deliver some(pile of shit)thing else!

Really, it isn't hard DICE - try this: Ten large maps with one main and several optional objectives - we pick where the insertion point is and the insertion style (blazing vs stealth). No need for an overarching story - just make the team the story and perhaps start to have a thread that connects the missions, but make them each different locals and stop this linear, must-show-realistic-traversal-from-A-to-B crap.

Does every military fps REALY need to constantly suck COD's linear, shit-covered cock?

Someone wake me when Halo 5 comes out! Halo, starting again with 4, seems like the only shooter that isn't over-designed to death. Like they don't mind spending tens of thousands of dollars on things most players will not bother with... shock!

The missions are also unbelievably linear. The multiplayer aspect of Battlefield is anything but linear. The huge maps, vehicles, and destruction mean that there are almost always multiple ways of getting from A to B, and the best approach will vary depending on the flow of the battle. That characteristic of the game is completely missing from the single player.

Ahhh, so DICE lied again when they tried to make a big deal about how their SP would be based off of MP and have large maps with multiple ways to do something...

Why am I even surprised? They pulled this with EVERY BF that has single player - claim on (very good) thing, and then deliver some(pile of shit)thing else!

Really, it isn't hard DICE - try this: Ten large maps with one main and several optional objectives - we pick where the insertion point is and the insertion style (blazing vs stealth). No need for an overarching story - just make the team the story and perhaps start to have a thread that connects the missions, but make them each different locals and stop this linear, must-show-realistic-traversal-from-A-to-B crap.

Does every military fps REALY need to constantly suck COD's linear, shit-covered cock?

Someone wake me when Halo 5 comes out! Halo, starting again with 4, seems like the only shooter that isn't over-designed to death. Like they don't mind spending tens of thousands of dollars on things most players will not bother with... shock!

You really should have spent some time with BF:42, or consulted some folks who have been sinking time into the franchise since it's inception. Most would put up an argument that :42 was the pinnacle of the franchise. It found a rather endearing balance between hyper-realism and unrealistically goofy physical antics that many other games have tried and failed to capture. The quirks of the engine it was built on ended up having consequences on gameplay that added to the fun.

Those of us around the competitive BF:42 scene will never forget a season final clinched by unveiling the 'wing walking' tactic the winning team discovered was possible on Iwo Jima, where the entire team spawned initially on the aircraft carrier, piled onto the bomber's wings, went prone, and could hang on across the water before parachuting down to the peak flag. Were there weird quirks in subsequent titles that led to similarly emergent or accidental antics? Not that I can recall.

You'll find others still that will testify on how the Desert Combat mod holds a place in their gamer heart that no other title has managed to fill; BF2, 3, and 4 included. The push in this franchise towards a high realism feel without compromise falls flat, makes the obvious bugs that much more jarring, and the rough edges that each title has carried much more impossible to overlook, I feel.

I understand the point of the piece was to provide an extensive overview of this newest iteration, but your opening certainly opened the door for some old-school BF-er like myself to go all reminiscent in the comments.

BF:42 is actually the most Battlefieldly Battlefield. And that's not something that's likely to change while the focus continues to be the next-gen engine and cinema-realistic graphics, instead of on the core gameplay.

Kind of stopped reading the article the moment you dissed 1942 without ever having played it.

I fell in love with Battlefield when I played the Wake Island demo, and spawned on a sinking carrier with claxons blaring.

I promptly jumped off of it because I'm an idiot, hit the water and survived, as a destroyer pulled up beside it, trying to defend. A torpedo promptly hit the destroyer and it started sinking too.

So swimming in the water in the middle of the ocean between the two gigantic hunks of metal screaming as they sank, with gunfire and zeroes blazing across the thin slit of sky above me, I basically sat back in my chair and went 'This is the greatest thing in the entire world'.

Battlefield 1942 was the greatest innovation in FPS since Quake. It was simultaneously balanced, arcady, stupid fun, and modifiable.

Battlefield 2 would arguably not exist without Desert Combat, the 1942 mod, which to this day still had more interesting helicopter handling. While 2 did have some improvements, you could make a good point that 1942 was the pinnacle of the series, and it's been downhill ever since. So while battlefield makes its sad attempt to be Modern Warfare+ with unlocks for unlocks, excuse me while I mourn the fact that the series has never returned to its original brilliant setting.

Needing to grind just to get to even footing with other players in a multiplayer FPS? No sale.I'm not against challenge/prestige modes where you voluntarily handicap yourself in equipment and skills and collect xp/levels to show off, but requiring every player to deal with that is asinine.

It is, but you have to factor in several other things. Ease of manufacture being one. Someone else above pointed out, correctly, that the Germans did not have every single troop outfitted with their best stuff. Our guys had the M1 across the board. So, on average, our guys had the better rifle. But, the Germans' best stuff?...... very well-made, very accurate, and very dependable.

They also didn't have to deal with "M1 Thumb"..... which, if you've ever effed up while reloading an M1, you know what I'm talking about. YEOWCH!

I have never played any BF game ever and it is very likely I will never do so either. I just wish more people would just return the game, this sends a hell of a lot bigger message to companies than simply writing on forums how bug ridden the game is. We are the ones enabling them to produce these kinds of games with these kinds of bugs.

I tried BF3, but was put off by the terrible sniping in multiplayer (being able to see and dodge sniper shots was ridiculous) so I went back to CoD. Has this been fixed for BF4?

Honestly, i think any of these games are having that issue.The worst experience i had ever was with Black Ops. You know i grand that i am old and my reflexes are not as fast anymore.Still, i think you can avoid most in BF since the maps are vast. Also, i think if you develop a strategy it may aid you in avoiding to be killed as often. Most people i observed use the same spots or strategy themselves.

One of the things that turns me sometimes off is if there is just tanks rolling around and you don't have a high survival rate. But i go with c4 against them. Works most of the time.

By whom exactly? The M1 was not outstanding in any way. The StG 44 was vastly superior to just about everything else when it came out. It's the very first assault rifle ever made.

Frankly, I think the SVT-40 was a better rifle then the M1 anyway if only because it used a magazine rather than a clip.

By the people who won the war?The victors usually get to dictate such things and make those kinds of pronouncements.And no, it wasn't an especially clever bit of engineering, but it was easy to mass produce and was fairly reliable. Consistency and standardization can outweigh brilliance in engineering when you start dealing with volume.

I played a lot of BF3, especially with fellow Arsians and Peter. I bought a new rig for it. I was hyped beyond belief for it, and dragged a lot of friends into the "ZOMG, you MUST play this game with me".

I enjoyed it for the first few months. But DICE's complete lack of care regarding getting rid of hackers / cheaters, and especially their nonchalance towards bug fixes finally broke the game for me. Which is really disappointing, because Ars has a fantastic gaming community with quality players and fun people.

I am not well connected. Is there a particular server i can join? I haven't found a good squad of people so far. Seems everyone is pursuing his own agenda in the game.

All in all, it sounds like a typical EA product.......Very pretty on the surface, potential to be something amazing, but the lack of follow-through and general "caring" about ensuring a quality finished product keeps it from being absolutely stellar.